Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Mission Junoon: Sanjna Kapoor talks of her latest passion

She is what
dreams are made of: beautiful looks, elegant, mysterious with a mind that has
inherited the best of both worlds, where east meets west and blends perfectly,
creativity flows from theatre and cinema, and a vibrant intellect pursues what
only passion, perseverance, imagination, rigor and discipline can achieve. Yes,
her name is Sanjna Kapoor, India’s most loved diva of the world of theatre.

Recently, her
resignation as Director of the very elite and intellectual Prithvi Theatre in
Mumbai, caused a flutter in the industry, but as she says, she needed to move
on to do something more, to add more fuel to her already existing passion, to
impact the environment in more ways and to begin her own trist with destiny, Junoon
Theatre. For more than 22 years she had carried the challenge of Prithvi
Theatre, started by her parents, Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal. It was both
her passion and her learning grounds. When she put the sceptre down, she felt it
needed other eminent people to carry the work forward, while she took the
experience of Prithvi Theatre, to hoards of Indians out there that wanted and
dreamed of making theatre an integral part of their daily lives, as natural as
taking a walk in the park.

Contemporary
theatre, which is all of 200 years, exists mainly in urban and semi-urban areas.
Inaugurated on February 29, 2012, Junoon Theatre, with a core team of four, wants
to break that trend. It desires to create multiple platforms of creativity by
using the large network of people in the field and make theatre accessible,
welcome and engaging to a wider mass of youth, children and adults across
India, through workshops, Plays, interaction, discussion and going beyond that
space. Like what exists in many countries abroad, Junoon Theatre hopes to increase
the total theatre ‘experience’ from booking to finale, and raise it to another
level, never experienced in India before. It envisages involvement of masses by
building capacity, through its network, so that the experience becomes a social
movement, a junoon, as it were. She
dreams of an India, where theatre is woven into the very fabric of society in a
manner that it becomes a way of life.

This creative
unrest to affect the total experience of theatre has its root in her
grandfather, the late Geoffrey Kendal, whose Shakespeareana Company brought the
bard, William Shakespeare to Indian schools, who had never heard of him before.
For thirty years, the extraordinary theatre personality along with his wife Laura
and daughters, Filicity Kendal, and Sanjna’s own mother, Jennifer Kendal,
toured the country taking Shakespeare to schools, public halls, places of
maharajas and every nook and corner of the country. It can be said quite accurately,
that Junoon Theatre is not only a transition as Sanjna calls it from Prithvi
Theatre, but an urgent compulsion of her genealogy to spread the fire of
imagination across the country, widely.

Sanjna Kappor,
the theatre and film personality is an able administrator; she may have the
fire of her grandfather and the history of Indian cinema in her DNA, but she is
careful, diligent, patient, slow, but sure. Her footsteps are small and
gradual, and while she has big dreams for Junoon Theatre, she is careful not to
go, so fast that she can trip on her own ghagra
skirt. Through the India Theatre Forum,
of which she is a founding member along with six others from the same field,
she undertakes, legal, copyright issues, food and nutrition, insurance, Policy
decisions affecting theatre personalities.

Going out to
the theatre has become as lucrative as going for a movie, because nothing comes
close to a stage performance, for both audience and dramatist - so intimate, so
engaging and responsive, such a fulfilling experience is live performance. As buying
power of the people increases, Universities, parents, children are looking
seriously at making a profession of Management in Arts and Theatre.

Finance is
always a concern though. Sanjna is working on a Sustainable Economic Model,
which will cater to premium pricing, and go to make the 25% reserved for the
masses, possible. While there will be ongoing smaller shows and workshops in
schools, and Plays, the yearly major event will bring in the best talent from
across the globe and India, and tour India in true Shakespeareana Company style.

Sanjna Kapoor
admits she has no life outside theatre. Perhaps she means what Sheakespeare had
said - all the world’s a stage – for there is her 10 year old son Hamir,
who is the apple of his mother’s eye, presently passionately engaged with Sports
cars, a far cry from his mother’s passion for theatre or his father’s passion
for tigers! Her husband Valmik Thapar, is a prolific well-known writer and
tiger enthusiast, with many books to his credit.

In a way,
both Sanjna Kapoor and her husband are engaged with the eco-system around them,
the former with the world inside, the power of imagination of the human mind to
create, sustain and evolve newer ways of evolving itself, while the latter with
the preservation of India’s national animal, the tiger. And their little one is
on a fast track, but loves drama and must approve all stories his mother tells the
world outside.

Such a cute
drama queen!

The article written by Julia Dutta was first published in the January 2013 issue of Atelier Magazine. To buy write to: Creative Nest Media Pvt. Ltd, M-66, Punj House, Outer Circle, Connaught Place, New Delhi - 110 001 Email: info@creativenestmedia.com